The inevitable result of being the platform with the least corporate lock-in.

I finally got into my Steam Deck this last year. Being able to take nearly every game made out and about, not just PC games, has been a great experience. It doesn’t matter to me as much that I can’t play at 4k and 300+ FPS.

The full slideshow is a great collection of data, really interesting stuff if you’re interested in gaming biz.

That said, while I’m sure PC enthusiasts (among the larger gaming audiences here at Lemmy and Reddit) will be thrilled to see PC gaming rising while mobile is falling, the actual revenue breakdown is less exciting. PC growth is driven by a larger percentage than ever of microtransactions.

Much of the presentation is centered around “black hole games,” which make up a ton of the market and are extremely difficult to pull users away from. Sad when a lot of the strategy seems to be about cost-cutting and getting better percentages from the storefronts rather than making better games.

Those graphs look like as if PC gaming was always a bit bigger than consoles, it was the pandemic that had new people stay at home and make a dent in it as they were heavily marketed to. Since that has passed, the dent has passed. Corps like console since it is more locked-down and corp friendly, so less piracy and less variety in target hardware, and no Steam to compete with their crappy ecosystems.

They would have liked that dent to be the start of a trend. But it wasn’t.

But wait I thought PC gaming was dying LOL.